The cooking pot market

Using the cooking pot market to explain the free online product and services seems purely genius at the first glance, but it only accounts for one part of what is really going on in the dual online media market.

If we look at the participatory media from users’ perspective, it is simply true that--

If a significant part of your needs are for information products themselves, you do not need to trade in your intangible earnings from the products you create for hard cash, because you can use those intangibles to "buy" the information you want.

Consumers would like to create content for reputation or exchanging for other valuable information provided by their peers. It explains why Bloggers.com, YouTube, and MySpace can exist and keep on expanding over the years. It will be hard to put a price tag on the value of user generated content online, but it is possible to quantify the utility of it with the measurement of how people perceive its usefulness.

From the media company’s perspective, the idea of cooking pot market offers a way to manage the supply of the content and maintain the audience base. But eventually, they will starve without cashing out the information resources they possess online. One common way to do it is through ad selling. Many new media platforms, which establish success in a cooking pot market, still have hard time to finance themselves. For example, YouTube, as the future for television, is considered to have a lot of buried treasure in term of making ad revenue.